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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
"Yeah, that's how it works in WoW.
But that's not how it works here, because all classes can use all gear types.
Fucks sake man, you don't even know something so basic about the game and you're already here crying about loot rules?"
I know all classes can wear any gear in AOC, (I stated so in a previous comment) what the heck is you point,
why in the world are you so obtuse? I have watched Q&As and read the WIKI
The loot does not matter, its how its distributed that matters, man oh man. (bangs head on desk)
Yes, I assumed you are from US, so if your not, why not say where your from, we could be pen pals, I told you what state I'm from. It would be interesting to know what other countries are looking at AOC, be sociable!
Soooo, can I assume that you are not a Company employee, just a fan of ML? Would that be accurate?
BTW, if you are from another country, you English is outstanding! Except perhaps reading comprehension, no, no, its not a ding, just saying.
If you're aware of this, what was the point of you bringing up certain classes getting access to certain loot in your last post?
Something something that's besides the point.
Going to try to break it down for you again. Please read this, and respond directly to the next paragraph in this post.
Since you are asking for a personal loot system where the boss drops the same amount of loot regardless of raid size and all classes can use all gear, what you are asking for is functionally identical to everyone rolling Need in Need Before Greed. Since all classes can use all gear, that means everyone would have access to all drops regardless of loot system, and since you're saying the amount of loot can stay consistent, it is effectively just randomly distributing all dropped gear among all players, which is exactly what would happen if everyone voted Need in Need Before Greed.
Do you understand now? Please?
It all comes down to one major point: The impact of bad faith in a Master Loot system is much more severe than the impact of bad faith in a Personal Loot system.
We can completely eliminate the potential harm from bad faith Master Loot systems, and Personal Loot can be made to work like Master Loot for group that agrees to give all loot to one player, with minimal inherent risks of bad faith affecting the distribution.
Need before greed is RNG between those who choose need. If no one chooses, need then it is RNG between everyone.
Then just use need before greed and have everyone roll need.
It's functionally exactly the same.
There are never bad players in a raid. Those usually get kicked when they are unable to do the content. Even so it should not be anyone's right to judge who is worthy of getting anything because you still all completed the content together. The entire spirit of older MMOs is that you made friends with players of all skill levels and you eventually did all the content together. Eventually everyone will be closer to the same skill level with minimal removals. That was all lost in WoW.
Joining a guild in WoW today is like applying for a job. Which is literally the most anti fun bull crap you can have in a video game. This is primarily because of the master looter system. No one can trust each other and most of WoW's competitors don't really adapt the ML system. They generally use a more advanced version of need or greed. The communities in FF14 specifically are way better than WoWs.
In FF14 people are almost never even talking about personal gain. The game does that for you. They chat about either things that matter in the guild, fun stuff, or where is x. You can actually have fun in that game whereas when I try to chat in WoW. People literally tell me to "shut the fuck up".
That alone tells you what kind of players each game has gathered.
Asmonbald is probably the worst person you can have to defend your points. You see as a guild leader he is going to want the most control he can possibly have. Whereas a lot of people just want the guild leader to direct what to do and the game itself distributes the possible rewards. That way the least amount of time is wasted as possible. Using ML to steal from people wastes literal months out of people's lives.
Like to point out that saying any of what I have said didn't happen to you is not a real counter argument to any of the logic I have said. It's like I'm telling you drive by's can happen and you are arguing that they can't.
The Loot system really changes a community. It's always been for the worst when ML is involved. Especially when personal loot has the exact same system to any guild as ML. With none of it's drawbacks.
Though trying to sway asmonbald fans with logic is a kin to yelling at a brick wall.
I'm from New England.
U.S. East
Does that really make that much of a difference? Does knowing that everyone hit that need button really weigh that heavily on your conscience? It functions exactly the same. If your suggested personal loot system isn't giving everyone some sort of reward (as WoW's does) it is functionally exactly the same as All Need in NBG, except it auto rolls for you.
And I'd like to point out that comparing a video game loot system to drive by shootings is absolutely absurd.
And you're still pretending like there aren't literal thousands of guilds happily using the master looter system either in conjunction with DKP or a loot council without any serious issues at all.
Made my day.
Now back to the topic.
Yea personal loot is not the same.
It's the lazy boys variant for those who cannot roll because they haven't been returned from afk.
Have you never noticed all those afk people in raidfinder just auto attacking the boss?
That's why people truly need personal loot.
Can't roll if afk.
Yea but back in older MMOs like 99% of the playerbase were bad players so being a bad player did not stand out.
Nowadays MMOs are extremely more difficult and players are extremely more skilled.
I mean just look at the first classic server ragnaros kill:
https://www.wowhead.com/news=294838/world-first-classic-ragnaros-kill-by-apes
Compare that to the guys back in actual vanilla.
But this is simply not the past and it will never be again.
So acting like there aren't bad players isn't exactly helpful to anyone.
Simply summoning the ghosts of the past doesn't make it the past.
Joining a wow guild can be like applying for a job because getting into a really good guild demands high performance just like working in a demanding working enviroment.
But you don't need to if you don't like it so I don't really get why you are upset about it.
Neither do I see any connection to the master looter system actually it is the opposite.
In fact many guilds use it to protect their guild, that also means their members, from loosing equipment to people who are simply passing by.
Without master looter that is simply not possible.
It's extremely frustrating if you equip a new player just so he can leave soon after being full geared.
The main reason I personally see why this is not so frequently happening in other games is that the wow devs became really good in balancing the bosses extremely tight around the equipment available to the playerbase.
What that in fact means is that your guild progress can be determined by having like 1% missing damage.
Making loosing equipment to people just passing by much more painful.
Once again this is completely about guild progress not personal gain.
Actually true since he said in a stream he has abused master looter to steal from people.
But I assume you are too lazy to actually research so you rather make up some weird stuff.
There we go:
So he is basically a vampire? But they need the life force to live themselves can't blame them for that.
The thing is your whole "master looter is evil" stance is kind of extreme.
Also you mostly blow it up with rhetorics instead of hard data or proper arguments .
But let's just take a short look at some of your wild claims to get an idea:
I mean just read them, most of them aren't even remotely proveable.
And you formulate them as facts!
(I know the last one is double quote in this post but just let the meaning sink in!)
No point in debating it anymore.
Heck, its not even a debate, you would think if Nb4G is the same as PL, that at least we could agree to replace Nb4G with PL, but no, that cant happen either. Why you ask, because?:
"Yea personal loot is not the same.
It's the lazy boys variant for those who cannot roll because they haven't been returned from afk.
Have you never noticed all those afk people in raidfinder just auto attacking the boss?
That's why people truly need personal loot.
Can't roll if afk."
The BS just goes on and on. I'm out, closing my tab.
Jesus you are an insufferable prick aintch ya? Everyone here has said have every system available and let the party leader choose the loot system for the party. As long as everyone gets an alert if the rules are changed at some point there is no issue. In fact I forget what MMO it was that made at least half the party okay any changes before they went through. Combine that with a solid cooldown on loot rule changes to prevent shenanigans and all is fine. Literally everyone gets the system they want.
WTF is wrong with you? No one here is the establishment....the fuck are you talking about. These are your fellow gamers who do not agree with you. That is literally it. Everyone here wants personal choice and you want that choice to be taken away. This shouldnt be news for you. People want to have the freedom to pick. Grow up.
What the....? No, of course not get back to bdo and stay there!
I'd prefer a new system and not have a choice over loot. It should be decided by the game who gets what and if you don't want it you can trade.
People who don't have ulterior motives for the system should easily be able to agree with that. I'm questioning why there are some who don't.
U.S. East
So you've now decided that your opinion is the only valid one and that anyone who disagrees with you has to have ulterior motives?
This mindset is absolutely toxic.
Because, incredibly enough, your opinions about these systems aren’t actually facts. You’ve “debunked” nothing, and you continue to basically accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with you of being a horrible, selfish, evil person who wants a dragon horde of loot all for themselves to roll around in.
Still none of you have acknowledged that the personal loot system you suggest, where the boss drops the exact same amount of loot as it would under a master looter system but it is automatically distributed, is exactly the same as everyone needing in Need Before Greed. Either way, everyone has a perfectly equal RNG chance of getting any loot that is dropped.
So just... do that, and stop trying to take away our choices.
However there has not really been any meaningful opposition to my points either. Aside from calling me stupid dupid face.
Especially when a lot of MMO's no longer even use the ML system anymore due to a lot of the things I have pointed out.
It's suspicious to support ML at all compared to trying to come up with a better system. Especially when more social games don't use it. Which is the only meaningful opposition to it and that isn't even true.
U.S. East
For the record, I don't consider personal loot (PL) the same as "need before greed" (NB4G) where everyone auto-rolls Need. Very similar IMO, but the main difference is that in a NB4G system, it's possible for 1 person to roll perfect and get ALL the loot, whereas a PL system could safeguard against that by limiting the amount of loot that gets funneled to one person. However, if the PL system didn't do that, then why call it PL at all?
My 2 cents on that.
Gear in most MMOs has been primarily BoP (Bind on Pickup), meaning as soon as a player picked up a piece of gear it became soulbound, and couldn't be traded to other players. NB4G was abused by people rolling Need on stuff they didn't really need. Thus, ML became the primary way to distribute loot. It prevented NB4G abusers and gave more control for gear to go where it was needed best. Did people abuse it? They certainly did, no question. It's debatable to what degree it was abused. But, at the time, it was the best option available.
Then WoW introduced personal loot (PL) and ML was disabled (except for legacy runs I think? For transmog farming? I don't know the specifics on that). But personal loot became a thing. In a game like WoW, I think personal loot was a step in the right direction to prevent abuse, but I think it was actually a step backwards in allowing gear to be funneled to the right places.
With PL in WoW, if you get an item you don't need but it is an item level upgrade, you are unable to trade that gear to other players. Also, any bonus rolls that grant loot is unable to be traded. While an ML system didn't allow bonus rolls, it did allow the most flexibility in loot distribution. PL I think allowed more loot in the long run, but it also was more restrictive.
But! This is all relative to a game like WoW, where bosses drop tons of gear, and that gear (and most gear, really) is all BoP.
AOC isn't WoW, so you can't have a discussion on loot distribution without taking into account the availability of gear, amount of gear dropped, and restrictions on trading gear.
Most importantly, gear in AOC is going to be freely tradeable. ML was very important in its inception because gear wasn't able to be freely traded. ML will be less needed compared to WoW because of that ability to be freely tradeable. However, I will say, that a ML can very well abuse the system even MORE than in WoW, BECAUSE the gear will be freely tradeable. In WoW, a ML may just keep 1 or 2 keys items that they could actually use. But in AOC, they don't necessarily need to be able to use a piece of gear in order to want to steal it. Imagine a situation where a ML would say, "F everyone, I'm keeping this gear and selling it on the markets, it's super rare. Thanks for free gold!!" Naturally, everyone would just go PK his ass, but it's still possible. You can't deny the possibility of it happening, however you can certainly argue how often it would happen (extremely rare). I'm on the side that you will certainly notice what type of person your raid leader is long before a situation like this arises. Plus, like others have said, don't run with a group that uses ML. Put a cooldown on the ability to switch to ML, so you can't switch it an instant before pulling a boss. Make it give a raid warning when its changed. Make it so at least 50% of the group needs to vote on it. I don't think it needs to be removed entirely (yet).
AOC crafting will be a big thing. I think every player in a raid or involved in an encounter should get some degree of crafting materials. I don't believe all crafting materials should go to a ML. How would they effectively distribute that back out to players? The easiest and most hassle free way for a ML to handle tons of crafting mats would be to simply deposit them into a guild bank for people to use. But then it's still gated behind guild rules, and just requires more permissions. And what if it isn't a guild group, how would a ML distribute that out? In those cases, it seems to me that ML isn't the solution. Make crafting mats PL, and everyone gets their share.
AOC loot in raids/dungeons/world bosses, if I recall, isn't going to be very common (at least, a lot less common than WoW, for sure). In fact, the rarer the loot is from these sources, the more valuable crafted items will be. Plus crafters will be able to shift/assign attributes of gear to best suit the person buying the gear. Loot dropped from encounters doesn't allow that. For two items of similar level (one from a boss, one that's crafted), I believe the crafted one to be more valuable due to the flexibility in assigning stats.
Personally, I'm a fan of the bidding system. Let the person with the highest bid get the loot they want, and everyone else gets a cut of that bid. It's been a while since I've seen a bid system used, but I never had an issue with it. It's very much like a built in DKP system, except you use gold.
TL;DR
Ability to trade gear freely is important when evaluating loot distribution methods. I'm not a fan of ML and won't run with it in groups I don't trust. Crafting will reduce the importance of loot dropped bosses/dungeons/raids. I like a bidding system. Love all of you.
This game won't have WoWs loot meta. No matter what system you pick it's going to be balanced with that in mind. There is no reason to latch onto ML when better systems are easy to make. Practically anything is better than ML in a fresh game.
The gear should go by luck and since it's freely tradable guilds can do whatever the hell they want no matter what the system actually is.
U.S. East
Loads of people have tried to actually discuss the subject, and rather than engage, you've decided that they're piling on to attack you while you belittle them.
I think your conduct in this thread has been demeaning and unhealthy for the community.
The problem is the strong resistance to a fair system everyone can be happy with.
If it was like that for the class system no one would be happy. You can't be this class and have to be this class instead because the guild said so. Invisible wall blocking you from leaving a node cuz the guild said so.
Rather it be a system founded in democracy than tyranny.
U.S. East
The middle ground in this whole discussion is literally have multiple loot systems and let parties decide which one they want to use....The fact you wont meet the opposing side in the middle ground suggests despite what you said that you are indeed emotionally invested. That and posting three times in a row. KEK.
No the middle ground is PL with free trading. Which makes literally no difference to guilds either way. Having ML in the game is the entire problem. It's not a system you can just ignore because it's going to ruin everyone's experience whether there is a choice or not. ML will find a way to screw over someone not as intelligent or just a newer player.
It's literally comparing a system with a glaringly obvious flaw to one with no flaw. People don't want to be forced to play with ML either. Which is the most likely discourse despite being the worst system.
It would be better to eliminate the problem than let it stick around.
The pro ML side is literally just going to end up as a bunch of cliches and their friends getting everything. Then everyone else getting nothing until they feel like it. It's literally what happens in WoW with ML. It makes a lot of sense too considering the low amount of guilds WoW has. Active ones not dead ones. It's got over 100 000 dead ones.
There are other factors that determined this, but when few to none of your competitors are using a system it means there is something wrong with it. Also I don't post in a row. I at least let people respond so they can do my work for me.
I'm not going to meet at something less than the middle ground. Especially for something that could potentially destroy the game. I don't understand the WoW community's obsession with ML so much. You guys like to screw each other so often that it's become normal?
When a system just existing can potentially cause problems despite choice. That system needs to go.
U.S. East
ML has the potential for abuse yes. But it also has the potential to be even more fair by circumventing RNG.
If I do a pug and see ML I'll leave. If I join a guild and they want to ML and I like their loot distribution plan fine. If they want to feed the main group see ya later. I'm sure there will be guilds that do NG.
Arguing so passionately against something you do not have to participate in seems like a waste of energy.
Regardless of the loot system, one thing is certain: don't play with people you don't trust and/or always make sure you're the party leader.
But in this case you absolutely can blame the game. When loot rules are set up in such a way that abuse is clearly enabled, why would you expect someone to support it?
Personal Loot, RNG Loot, whatever term you call it by, is the best option in a free trade system. The system has minimal potential for abuse, because at worst you can “steal” a small amount of materials that the game assigned to you. In a Master Loot system, one player can run off with everything, there’s no way to reduce that potential abuse because the system is designed to give someone total loot control.
Guilds can still decide who gets what if the raid group agrees. For groups that do not agree to funnel loot, typically happens in PUGs or more casual runs, they shouldn’t have to.
Tbh I’d be fine if ML was just removed entirely. Any other system is preferable to it, as all of the other have less inherent abuse capabilities.
Let's say you have a guild and have been running raids for a long time and have a point system. You get a new member who has agreed to that point system you take them along on their first run while the guild is on their 100th plus. The first legendary drops and that new member got it . Now every single person has more points aquired that new player he just G quits.
There is no reason to argue against any of these loot systems when you can just make it an option. Letting the players decide what they want to use. Obviously the ability to change it last second should not be possible. Perhaps when it is changed to ML a pop up appears for people to accept.
Player Choice: "Players should have the option to choose."
Pro PL: "Players should have the option I choose."
Glad to see people staying objective.
Sorry but your logic here is flawed.
In a master loot situation you have to hope that ONE person in the group is honest and does not screw everyone over.
In the personal loot situation you just described, you now have to hope that EVERY person in the group is an honest person and will not screw everyone else over.
Remember that loot in this game is mostly not BOP, thus if an item drops that is worth 1mil gold or whatever , who is more likely to distribute that item fairly within the guild. A guildmaster or lootmaster that has a vested interest in their guild, or some guy that just joined 3 days ago, and happened to get some expensive, SELLABLE, drop he cant use on the first run?
IMO the choice is fairly evident as to which scenario has the higher likelihood of drama, and severe impacts.